The Experience of Anesthesia Awareness
The most traumatic case of anesthesia awareness is full consciousness during surgery with pain and explicit recall of intraoperative events. In less severe cases, patients may have only poor recollection of conversations, events, pain, pressure, or difficulty in breathing. Some cases of difficulty in breathing are caused by intubation errors and/or problems with the ventilator and a patient might be suffocating.
The experiences of patients who have experienced anesthesia awareness vary widely depending on why they became aware, whether they were paralyzed and patient responses and sequelae vary widely as well. It is unusual for someone having experienced awareness without pain or suffocation to suffer bad sequelae. The experience may be extremely traumatic for the patient or not at all depending on whether they could breathe and what errors were made.
Because the medical staff may not know if a person is unconscious or not, it has been suggested that the staff maintain the professional conduct that would be appropriate for a conscious patient.
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